The Sixties
Years of Hope, Days of Rage
Gitlin, Todd
Publisher: Bantam Books, New York, USA
Year Published: 1987
Pages: 514pp Price: $15.95 ISBN: 0-533-34601-6
Library of Congress Number: E841.G57 1987 Dewey: 973.922
Resource Type: Book
Cx Number: CX3753
One of the best books on the Sixties in the U.S., bringing to life the political and cultural currents, including especially the music, which raged during that decade, and setting them in historical context.
Abstract:
One of the best books on the Sixties in the U.S., bringing to life the political and cultural currents, including especially the music, which raged during that decade, and setting them in historical context. Gitlin attempts, with much success, to evoke "the spirit of the time from the interior, yet without succumbing to the hallucinatory giddiness of the late Sixties especially, whose sheer wildness, even now, seems the stuff of another century."
His account reaches back to the Fifties as well, noting the stirrings of change which made that decade "a seedbed as well as a cemetery." In the context of our own more conservative times (at least in the Western nations), we will want to take note of Gitlin's description of "the self-satisfied Fifties" as "criss-crossed by underground channels where the conventional wisdoms of the time were resisted, undermined, weakened. It was in these enclaves of elders and subterranean channels, rivulets, deep-running springs -- or backwaters and swamps, depending on your point of view -- that unconventional wisdoms, moods and mystiques were nurtured."
Gitlin sees the civil rights movement as perhaps the key factor in sparking the political movements of the Sixties, the thing that made pockets of cultural resistance open up into political activism.
[Abstract by Ulli Diemer]
Table of Contents
Introduction
PART ONE: AFFLUENCE AND UNDERTOW
CORNUCOPIA AND ITS DISCONTENTS
The Wide Open Spaces of Affluence
Terrors
Intimations
UNDERGROUND CHANNELS
Wild Ones
"What, Me Worry?"
"Deliver Me from the Days of Old"
ENCLAVES OF ELDERS
"A Camaraderle of Loneliness"
The Liberal Summons
Left Remnants, Red Diapers
PART TWO: THE MOVEMENT
LEFTWARD KICKING AND SCREAMING
1960
Uneasy in an Anteroom in Camelot
"Destructive Criticism of a Destructive System"
THE FUSED GROUP
"A Band of Brothers Standing in a Circle of Love"
The Importance of Being Anti-Anti-Communist
AIN'T GONNA LET NOBODY TURN ME 'ROUND
Radicals and the Liberal Glow
A Collision of Political Cultures
Justice and the Department
White Shield, White Heat
Atlantic City
The Revolutionary Pastorale
Floaters and Hardliners
"The Man Without the Uniform"
"NAME THE SYSTEM
Old Styles in Acrimony
"A Frenzied One-Sided Anti-American Show"
"If They Were Serious"
Enter Progressive Labor, Laughing
PART THREE: THE SURGE
8. "EVERYBODY GET TOGETHER"
All-Purpose Apocalypse
"I Can't Get No"
"Far from the Twisted Reach of Crazy Sorrow"
"Smile on Your Brother"
Being-In
"What It Is Ain't Exactly Clear"
9. PUBLIC NUISANCES
The Theater of Outlaws
A Comic Collision
The Theory and Practice of Yippie
Armed Love in Fat City
10. FIGHTING BACK
A Prologue to the Late Sixties
"What Does Whitey Do?"
From Protest to Resistance
What Do These People Want?
11. THE OTHER SIDE
"All for Vietnam"
"No Paradise"
PART FOUR: FORCING THE REVOLUTION
12. 1968
The Politics of Extremity
Sleeping Dogs
Varieties of Antiwar Experience
The Loyal Opposition
Tet
"A Giant Stampede"
13. THE DECAPITAION OF THE HEROES
The Last Black Hope
The Action Faction
Dead Center
Violence Shock
14. THE CRUNCH
Lurching Toward Chicago
The Caldron
The Aftertaste of Tear Gas
15. THE SPRING OF HOPE, THE WINTER OF DESPAIR
The Language of the Millennium
The Bogey of Race
The Fragile Paradise of People's Park
16. WOMEN: REVOLUTION IN THE REVOLUTION
17. THE IMPLOSION
The Antiwar Stalemate
The Revolutionary Loop
The Logic of Sectarianism
Kicking Ass
When Prophecy Falls
"We Have to Create Chaos"
"We've Got to Turn New York into Saigon"
18. FADEOUT
19. CARRYING ON
Settling In
Encounter Culture
Kicking Back
In Search of an Ending
ACKNOWLEDGMENTS
NOTES
INDEX
Subject Headings
